“Why, Mother?” I knew better than to ask, but she would allow me this curiosity with only a harsh glare before explaining.

“They aren’t clean enough and I don’t have time to clean them until Friday. So you won’t sit on any furniture and you’ll stand at the table when you eat.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“You will not so much as touch any of the furniture. That will help you remember.”

“Yes, Mother.”

All of the rules were there for my own good, and as soon as I began to understand that, I was able to practice loving them. Which I did. To the best of my ability. At least I think I did.

But there was one rule in particular that I struggled with more than any of the others. Mother had always made it perfectly clear that I was to have no impure relationships with any other person. By this, she meant no impure contact with any girl or boy or man or woman. And even more, no impure thoughts.

“What are impure thoughts?” I asked her.

“You must not think about their flesh, especially the flesh that’s covered. Adam and Eve were covered by God for a reason. Only animals engage in fleshly activity, and even they don’t think about it. A human only reverts to the animal in them when impurity sets in, only worse than an animal because humans think about it too, which is doubly worse. You’re not an animal so you don’t act like one.”

“What about everyone else?” I wanted to know.

“The rest of us can’t help acting like animals at times. But you’re pure, sweetheart.”

I didn’t really understand her comparison, but I accepted the explanation at face value.

“If you ever have an impure thought, or if you ever let anyone touch you where your skin is covered, you will tell me,” she said.

“Like who?” I asked.

“Like Paul, Zeke’s boy. Or like any other boy you ever see.”

I hadn’t seen any other boy besides Paul, and I thought of Paul, who was my age, like a brother.

“And you’ll tell me immediately if so much as a single impure thought crosses your mind,” she said.

“I will, Mother.”

“So we can cleanse your mind of it.”

“Yes, Mother.”

At first, the rule was easy to keep, but as Paul and I grew older, he began to look at me with tenderness in his eyes. It made me feel special and one day about a year ago, as he helped me clean a brown smudge off my dress before my Mother could see it, it occurred to me that he liked me. I mean really liked me. I wasn’t sure what to think of that.

As time went on, I began to think about Paul more and more, and words from my prior life, like boyfriend, would pop into my mind without warning. Sometimes even crazier thoughts like being married and maybe even having a baby one day. With Paul, because I didn’t know any other boys.

I only told my mother about the thoughts once when the thoughts first came to me, and then only in general terms without mentioning Paul. Her reaction was immediate: she gripped her head and paced back and forth, nearly frantic, informing me in no uncertain terms that I was on a very slippery slope to defilement that would forever bring ruin to not only myself, but to her, and to my father, and to Bobby. And to Zeke.

I spent the next twenty-four hours in my bedroom closet, where the darkness was meant to wipe away all of my imaginations. She baptized me twice that next Sunday, just to be sure.

But neither the darkness nor the extra baptism worked. I didn’t tell my mother about the defiling thoughts that kept jumping into my head, because I didn’t want to upset her. But the harder I tried to guard against them, the more frequently the thoughts seemed to come.

What would it be like to hold hands with Paul? Or to kiss him? Or to tell him that sometimes I got butterflies in my stomach when I thought of him.

I felt terribly guilty for both having these thoughts, and for not confessing them to Mother as I’d promised. I was living a lie, you see, and I knew that if I continued living it, I would put us all in hell.

In fact, I’d already put myself in a hell, here on earth, at least that’s what it felt like, and the only way out was to tell Mother, at which point she would only put me in another hell of sorts, and that hell wouldn’t stop the thoughts from coming so I would only go back into the first hell. And God wasn’t helping me with my lustful thoughts, likely because he hated liars. No amount of pleading on my knees seemed to get his attention.

And why would he listen to me? I was in hell.

So you see, I had worked my way into a terrible spot by the time I turned eighteen, with no way out that I could see.

And still, the moment I heard that Paul was coming for a few hours on my birthday, my heart began to beat faster. Mother had seen fit to invite him over to play with Bobby and me.

I had dressed properly, in rain boots and a long, light-blue dress that covered my legs and arms. We spent an hour or so wandering around the property and in the still house where Paul talked about making moonshine. I had never helped with “the business,” as Paul put it, but I’d often heard Wyatt talk about it. Zeke made the finest shine and had customers from Arizona to Virginia who were willing to pay handsomely for his limited batches. Two nearby farmers supplied high quality, organic corn exclusively for Zeke’s mash and a natural spring on the property provided a steady flow of pure water that gave the shine its uniquely sweet flavor. The whole operation, from source to distribution, was sophisticated and Zeke ran it like a skilled businessman who was as shrewd as he was ambitious. From the custom-made copper kettles used to cook the mash to the selection of each season’s bottling, he oversaw every decision and was training his son to take over his empire someday.

Paul wasn’t like Zeke, though. He was kind and short—Mother sometimes called him a runt under her breath—and he had curly blond hair and a smooth face and plump lips. I didn’t really remember other boys too much, so in my mind, Paul was all there was, and to me he looked about as magnificent as any boy might look.

But it was the way he treated me that made my heart flutter. The way he would quickly open the door to the still house for me, as if I were a queen. The way he slowed to match my pace so he could stay close. The way he smiled at me, bright blue eyes flashing. How could I not return that smile?

I asked Bobby if he could get a blanket from the house, which he was only too willing to do. Fifteen minutes later we had it spread it out under a tree behind the house, and I was seated with my legs folded back to my right, facing Paul, who sat cross-legged watching me make one of my straw dolls.

“Eden likes making dolls,” Bobby said, picking at his nose.

“That’s right, Bobby,” I said, mindful of where he might put his dirty fingers. “And this one’s going to be very special.”

“Why’s that?” Paul asked.

When I glanced up I saw that he was watching me with that look of great interest and for a moment longer than I had planned, I returned his gaze.

He wasn’t required to follow my rules of cleanliness, naturally—none of the other kids were, he told me. And he thought that made me very special. I think he was actually in awe of me.

And maybe I was in awe of him because he didn’t have so many rules, and could wear whatever he wanted, and get his hands dirty, and go into the swamps—not that I wanted to, mind you. I was terrified of both the water and whatever lived under its surface. But his freedom was as wondrous to me, as my cleanliness was to him.

I looked back down to my hands, busy at work on the doll I was weaving from long stalks of half-dried swamp grass. But I wasn’t thinking about the doll. I was thinking about the fact that I was sliding, this very moment, down that very slippery slope my mother had warned me about.